From that pool, each of the 4 legislative leaders selects 2 members of a reapportionment commission. Those 8 members then select 3 members from the original pool. No more than 4 members can be enrolled in any one party. That reapportionment commission then draws the district lines for both state and congressional offices. The bill provides several specific criteria to be followed in that drafting process, including a preference for competitive districts.
The legislature must vote on the plan that is produced, and if it does not pass, the commission can do another version. If the third plan drawn by the commission does not pass, the Legislature can pass its own plan. But the Legislature's plan must serve the bill's criteria. If the plan ends up in court (which the bill virtually guarantees), then the bill instructs the Court of Appeals to select that plan which best serves the stated criteria.
In sum, this bill is not perfect, but it would be a tremendous step forward in bringing a measure of independence and rationality to the reapportionment process. It does by legislation what really should be done by constitutional amendment, but the chances of its passage are thus much greater. While it preserves significant control for the Legislature, it also would likely produce a Court of Appeals decision that would select one of the commission's plans over that drawn by the Legislature itself. For these reasons, the Brennan Center and several other good government organizations, including the Citizens Union, strongly support the bill.

Yesterday I picked up a funny graphic from Jonathon Delacour's site, with a picture of Alfred E Neuman, next to a slogan "White, male and damn proud of it!" I like to laugh at myself, so why not laugh at my gender too. Almost anything with the What Me Worry kid is funny. Let's have a good laugh, then settle down, and do some positive PR for our gender and our race. Sure, lots of terrible people were white and male, but so were a lot of great people, heroes, martyrs. People who cured diseases, and stood up to tyrants. Artists, teachers, comedians, people who served as role models for boys and men, even some sons of feminist women (like me, for example). I know some women are offended by this, I've heard from them, but this isn't about you, it's about us. So I'm going to start running an occasional positive image of white maleness on Scripting News, for no other reason that to help white men, like myself, feel like we have permission to do good things and serve as role models for young men, and for ourselves.

N.Y.'s Road to Ruin
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/42626.htm

March 16, 2005 -- ONCE the Legislature adopted a "temporary" personal-income-tax increase in 2003, it was only a matter of time before someone in Albany moved to make the tax hike permanent.

Sure enough, the heavy-spending budget resolution approved by the state Assembly this week includes an open-ended extension of the state's 7.7 percent flat rate on taxpayers with incomes over $500,000. The proposal will now be on the table in budget negotiations between Assembly Democrats and Senate Republicans — who have their own big spending appetites, and who supported the temporary rate hike just two years ago.

If enacted, this would be New York's first permanent increase in the income-tax rate in more than 30 years. And it would send a troubling signal to investors and business decision-makers that the era of pro-growth tax reduction is over in the Empire State.

* * *

Not so long ago, the relationship between taxes and economic growth was better understood by Democrats as well as Republicans in Albany. In fact, over the past quarter-century, the greatest reductions in state income-tax rates have been signed into law by Democratic governors.

Hugh Carey cut the top rate from 15 percent to 10 percent during his last term in office. And Mario Cuomo saw the top rate decline further, to 7.875 percent. (Cuomo reneged on further, scheduled cuts.)

Pataki's 1995 tax-cut package brought the top rate down to 6.85 percent — lowest since the '50s. But even at that level, the vast majority of middle- and upper-income New Yorkers were subject to the heaviest state income-tax burden in the region.

And for New York City residents, the combined state and local income tax rate now tops out at over 12 percent — highest in the country.

Because many small, closely held firms and partnerships are subject to the state personal income tax rather than the corporate tax, what the Assembly is proposing is not just a higher permanent rate on individuals but a tax hike for employers.

The deductibility of state and local taxes on federal returns is often cited as an argument in favor of raising New York's income tax. But deductibility isn't what it used to be.

Thirty years ago, when the Empire State's top rate was 15 percent, the top federal rate was 70 percent. This meant the effective state-tax bite on the highest-earning households was only 4.5 percent. Today, with the federal top rate set at 35 percent, the post-deductibility cost of a 7.7 percent state rate is 5 percent.

Plus, many high-income New Yorkers are subject either to the Alternative Minimum Tax, which doesn't permit deductions, or to a cap on itemized deductions. Either way, the deduction is worth the least to those who send the most to Albany. (And deductibility itself may not survive the next round of tax reform in Washington.)

And it's not as if some of New York's wealthiest taxpayers lack any other reasons to leave. The phase-out of the federal estate tax is having the effect of making New York's state "death tax" exceptionally high. Lawyers and financial planners are already advising their New York clients to move to states such as Florida and South Carolina, which have no estate tax at all.

Even putting aside the economic considerations, the Empire State is dangerously over-reliant on its personal income from high-income households. In 2001, for example, state residents with incomes above $500,000 represented barely 1 percent of taxpayers but paid more than 30 percent of the taxes.

The downside of depending so heavily on such a small number of taxpayers should be obvious: It means that when the wealthiest New Yorkers have a bad year, the entire state suffers inordinate fiscal stress. This is precisely what happened between tax years 2000 and 2002 — when all of the decline in state income-tax revenues was concentrated in high-income households.

Financing popular programs with higher taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers may be smart politics. But shifting even more of New York's steadily rising public sector burden to roughly 65,000 footloose tax filers with volatile incomes would make for truly dumb policy.

"A public-benefit corporation chartered by New York State in 1965, the MTA is governed by a 17-person Board. Members are nominated by the Governor, with some recommended by New York City's mayor and the county executives of Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Dutchess, Orange, Rockland, and Putnam counties, with the members representing the latter four casting one collective vote. The Board also has six rotating non-voting seats held by representatives of organized labor and the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee (PCAC), which serves as a voice for users of MTA transit and commuter facilities. All Board members are confirmed by the New York State Senate."

“EXCELSIOR” OR BUST?
FISCALWATCH MEMO March 7, 2005

Governor George E. Pataki says the last four years have been “the worst … since the Great Depression”[1] for New York’s finances.

You wouldn’t know it from looking at the state budget, though. Since the end of the 2001 fiscal year[2], state funds[3] spending has risen 18 percent. That’s a growth rate of one and a half times inflation – despite the fiscal fallout from a national recession, a nasty Wall Street bear market and the destruction of the World Trade Center.

In fact, as explained below, New York State has exerted somewhat less fiscal discipline in the 2001-05 boom-and-bust cycle than during a comparable period in the early 1990s.

Recent state spending trends underscore the high stakes in Albany’s fiscal 2006 budget negotiations. Despite the widespread media focus on “cuts,” especially in health care, Pataki’s proposal calls for net state funds spending growth of 5.5 percent – twice the rate of inflation. If the Legislature is allowed to make significant additions and restorations to the Governor’s budget, New York will be hobbled by state budget shortfalls for years to come.

Déjà vu all over again

Notwithstanding the governor’s frequent allusions to the 1930s, the state’s latest economic and fiscal travails aren’t completely unprecedented. Indeed, there are striking similarities between the early 2000s and the early 1990s. During both periods:

• New York experienced an economic recession more severe than the national average.
• Medicaid costs skyrocketed.
• New York’s budget gaps were closed in large part with tax hikes, increased borrowing and fiscal gimmicks.
• The Legislature set new records for tardiness in adopting a state budget.

No two economic cycles are exactly alike, of course. For example, the state lost more private sector jobs during the early 1990s, while the revenue losses were much greater after the 2001 recession.

Read the entire article here.

SENDING JOBS TO NASSAU
BY STEVEN MALANGA

?I?N the eyes of New York's pols, stopping Wal-Mart was supposed to be a victory for small stores in Queens and for the city's working people who were about to be "exploited" by the big, bad retailer. But the real victor was Nassau County, which like other suburban locales has benefited hugely over the years from the city's efforts to keep out big-box stores — an effort that started long before Wal-Mart came on the scene.

To understand just how big a winner Nassau is, consider a few statistics:

Queens' residents produce slightly more in aggregate personal income every year than the residents of next-door Nassau County — nearly $65 billion vs. almost $64 billion, according to the state Labor Department.

Given those numbers, you would suppose that the two counties would have similar levels of retail employment and spending. Sorry, you'd be wrong.

The last federal economic census, taken in the late 1990s, estimated that Nassau has about double the annual retail-sales volume as Queens. Not surprisingly, Nassau boasts a much bigger, thriving retail sector. It has 82,000 retail jobs in about 6,200 stores, paying about $2.3 billion annually in wages, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics census of employment and wages.

Queens, by contrast, has only 49,000 retail jobs — a whopping 40 percent fewer than Nassau — and only about 5,700 stores, paying a total of $1.2 billion a year in wages. It's no mystery why these vast differences exist despite the potential size of the Queens marketplace. For decades, New Yorkers have been leaving the city to shop because city officials keep at bay the stores where their constituents want to shop in. In 1993, when the big-box controversy first erupted, the polling firm Leo J. Shapiro and Associates asked New Yorkers about their shopping patterns and found that more than half of city residents leave the city to shop regularly, often visiting stores they can't find in Gotham. Obviously, the city's big box policies haven't done much to protect Queens' small retailers, as the recent stats on jobs and sales in Queens and Nassau demonstrate.

Of course, the big loser in all of this is the city's taxpayers. The extra sales-tax income that Queens alone forfeits to Nassau County might amount to about $250 million a year — to say nothing of lost property-tax revenues when sites sit empty while big-box stores build energetically in Nassau or Westchester or New Jersey.

Steven Malanga is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.

These doctrines and guarantees are central to the American experience and remain essential to our present-day self-definition and national identity. Not the least of the reasons we honor the Constitution, then, is because we know it to be our own. It does not lessen our fidelity to the Constitution or our pride in its origins to acknowledge that the express affirmation of certain fundamental rights by other nations and peoples simply underscores the centrality of those same rights within our own heritage of freedom.

Can you believe Republicans defend the idea that states should kill children, in the name of justice? If ever there was proof that we need help. And the Republicans talk about values. Feh. Values to kill children.

The Court's decision today establishes a categorical rule forbidding the execution of any offender for any crime committed before his 18th birthday, no matter how deliberate, wanton, or cruel the offense. Neither the objective evidence of contemporary societal values, nor the Court's moral proportionality analysis, nor the two in tandem suffice to justify this ruling.

In urging approval of a constitution that gave life-tenured judges the power to nullify laws enacted by the people's representatives, Alexander Hamilton assured the citizens of New York that there was little risk in this, since "[t]he judiciary . . . ha[s] neither FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment." The Federalist No. 78, p. 465 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961). But Hamilton had in mind a traditional judiciary, "bound down by strict rules and precedents which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them." Id., at 471. Bound down, indeed. What a mockery today?s opinion makes of Hamilton's expectation, announcing the Court's conclusion that the meaning of our Constitution has changed over the past 15 years -- not, mind you, that this Court's decision 15 years ago was wrong, but that the Constitution has changed.

I think the Supreme Court's decision holding that the death penalty may not be imposed on killers who were 16 or 17 at the time of their crimes was unsound, for the reasons that Orin has noted here, and that Justice Scalia noted in dissent. I'm not sure what I think of the execution of such killers as a policy matter, but I think Justice Scalia is right that this is not unconstitutional.

In other words, Simmons sought to induce other juveniles to participate in
his crimes by telling them they need not fear criminal prosecution. This
argument would have been unnecessary were his friends not deterred, at least
in part, by such threats. From this proposition it is but a small step to
assume that the severity of the criminal sanction -- death as opposed to a
set jail term -- could have some deterrent effect on the margin. This does
not mean that capital punishment for juveniles is a good idea, but it does
suggest that Justice Kennedy may have been a bit too quick to dismiss the
potential for deterrence. Indeed, his own recital of the facts should have
raised a red flag on this point.

Read the entire post here.

UPDATE III: John Hindracker, of Powerline, has a guest essay at The Weekly Standard on the Roper decision entitled A Government of Men, available here.